Beautiful You (27 page)

Fear shadowed Penny’s heart. She herself was allergic to shellfish. Their first dinner at Chez Romaine, when she’d almost ordered scallop sushi, Max had stopped her. Somehow Max had also known about her severe allergy.

“My wife,” he said. Where his penis and testicles had once dangled, Penny saw that there was only a rude wound gushing blood. The same dying hand that had presented the articles now offered his ubiquitous notebook; holding it open to a specific page, he said, “ ‘Test subject number eleven forty-eight, Myrtle Harrigan, March twenty-fourth, 19—. Place: Shippee, Nebraska …’ ”

Penny’s mother sobbed quietly as Maxwell read aloud the details of their tryst. Twenty-five years earlier, she had been a small-town newlywed attending a pie social at the local grange hall. In untypically gallant language Max had recorded, “ ‘The test subject seemed bereft as she confided in me about her inability to bear a child. A stranger in town, I must’ve seemed a safe person with whom to unburden her heart.’ ” A generation ago, this young Nebraskan woman had spilled out her secret fears to Max just as Penny would on their first date at
Chez Romaine. “ ‘The woman was a hundred and sixty-eight centimeters in height, approximately fifty-four kilograms in weight—’ ”

A distance away from where Max held his notebook, recounting his past, Penny’s weeping mother lifted her face from a handful of tissues and interrupted: “I was only fifty-one kilograms!”

Dying, Max continued. “ ‘In my heart I knew I could do more for this poor, barren woman than provoke her to a gut-wrenching orgasm. It was within my power to give her the baby she so badly wanted.’ ”

He described how he’d seduced this latest test subject over a slice of pumpkin pie. Her husband was away, attending a Promise Keepers weekend retreat. It took very little charm to persuade this lonely young housewife. Max had consummated the evening in the backseat of his rented Ford Explorer.

“ ‘When her heart rate reached one hundred and sixty-three bpms,’ ” Max announced flatly, “ ‘I implanted a cloned zygote along with the latest generation of nanobots needed to ensure its survival.’ ”

Sobbing, Penny’s mom insisted, “I’ve never weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds, even after you got me pregnant!”

Nine months later, Penny had been born. A seeming miracle.

From his anguished expression Penny knew her father had no idea. Neither of her parents had suspected that they’d played a part in Max’s plan to replicate his long-deceased wife. They’d innocently harbored the experiment of a fiend. He could’ve planted his embryo in any of the many women he’d romanced. He could’ve implanted embryos in all of them.

More troubling to Penny was the real possibility that she wasn’t herself. It was bad enough that impulses were being
beamed to her, prompting the arousal of her pleasure centers. Now her very DNA was secondhand, bequeathed to her by a madman genius who yearned to be reunited with his beloved. She, Penny Harrigan, was the genetically resurrected Phoebe Maxwell.

In that shocked, otherwise silent moment, one voice rang out. As spunky as ever, Monique squealed, “Omaha girl! Yikes!”

Farther back in the church, Esperanza, once more a Latin spitfire, shrieked,
“Ay, caramba!”

“All your life my agents have kept watch over you,” Max whispered, blood leaking from the ragged gash between his legs. The church had fallen so silent that everyone present could hear his confession. Penny had only to look at the faded photograph in the obituary to know this was all true.

Her guardian angels, she realized, weren’t the helpful agents of Homeland Security. Since infancy, those suited and besunglassed sentries had protected her on Max’s behalf. They’d allowed nothing to befall her before she could mature as a replacement for his long-dead wife.

“You are proof that my cloning technology will work,” Max continued. “I’ve spent my life gaining access to every uterus in the civilized world.”

As a gesture, even to Penny, it was really quite touching. Maxwell
had
loved her. He’d loved her enough to resurrect her from the dead.

Maxwell crowed, “You with your perfect genitals, my good girl, you will be my gift to all men!”

The Baba’s battered corpse lay beside him, so close that his blood washed against it. As the flow of his living juices slowed,
Max’s eyes fluttered closed. His lungs exhaled their final breath. “Oh, Phoebe … I’ve missed you for so many years.…” And Max was gone.

Alone in her Himalayan cave—nude, of course—Penny sprinkled seasonings into a stewing broth of chopped lizards. She stirred the simmering pot and brought a steaming spoonful to her lips. The taste filled her with a sad nostalgia for the dead Baba. Not an hour after the lamia and Max had expired on the floor of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Penny had boarded a private chartered jet and was winging her way to Nepal. She’d scaled the ragged cliffs of Mount Everest still wearing the tatters of her wedding gown. She’d told no one her destination.

Penny’s parents were safe. Monique was delivered from her battery-powered obsession. Monique, to judge from the text messages she blasted on an hourly basis, was engaged to marry Tad. She’d continue to reside in the Upper East Side town house
and
have the adoration of a handsome spouse.

Penny reasoned that perhaps in due time a trickle of students would find her here, lured by the ancient legend of a mystical sex witch who could perpetuate the erotic legacy of the ages. A constant stream of physically perfect specimens striving for erotic education would deliver themselves to apprentice with her. Penny was the heiress to the collected tantric skills of all time, was she not? She, Penelope Anne Harrigan, would accept the torch passed to her by the likes of Baba Gray-Beard and Bella Abzug. She’d liberate women from having to go to men for fulfillment. This legacy—not clothes, not jewelry or practicing law—this was the destiny she had long sought. Hers was a power based on carnal pleasure. Her kingdom a realm beyond interpersonal politics.

Penny had learned what was important. Family was important. Love was paramount.

Slowly she stirred. Concocted according to the Baba’s favorite recipe, the soup’s surface was garnished with flakes of spicy guano. As Penny squatted beside the cooking pot she enjoyed the gentle warmth of the flames. In the stance of a sumo wrestler, she lackadaisically stroked herself with a short, knurled length of what looked like damp wood. It was the Baba’s longest finger, the very finger with which the wise ancient had read all of Penny’s secrets. As the old lamia had cut a finger from her own dead mother, Penny had severed this memento mori from her mentor’s cooling corpse. Still, the keepsake, even well lubricated with stone-ground rabbit sebum, fell far short of slaking Penny’s growing melancholy.

The words
arousal addiction
loomed in her mind, but she shooed them away.

As she dipped her spoon for a second taste, she worried that millions of ladies all over the world were likewise crouched, struggling to achieve fresh self-fulfillment. After the sultry ordeal of Beautiful You it was possible that they might never achieve comparable heights of release.

The rudimentary pleasure tools fashioned by the Baba … they were okay. But minus the high-tech vaginal stimulation of Max’s hybrids, not to mention the salivating attention of the mass media, Penny felt down in the dumps. Perhaps the eggheads were right. Just as teenage boys clung to their precious video games and skin flicks, Penny longed for her bright pink products. Perhaps arousal addiction was real. Her limbic brain was thirsting for dopamine. Her hypothalamus was completely catawampus! She was suffering withdrawal from the Beautiful You effect. She redoubled her efforts with the desiccated finger but felt little reward.

Leaving the fireside, she waddled across the cave’s littered
floor in search of something. She cast aside the aged tendons and Prada handbags in her frantic search. At last, she found the object she so feverishly sought.

It was a small black box, no larger than a Game Boy. Max’s controller. She’d pocketed it in the final moments of her botched nuptials. After Max had been fatally cut down by a flaming dildo projectile, she’d also made off with his precious notebook. Since then she’d spent the wintery hours deciphering these coded records of his sensual research. The mosaic of black push buttons was cryptically labeled, but she’d taught herself what combinations to press for the best results.

She’d begin with the blizzard winds outside the cave’s entrance. Night and day they wailed, a constant annoyance. Quickly Penny utilized the controller to adjust her perception.

She keyed in the first code, and the satellite-relayed result was almost instantaneous. She tasted a flood of red velvet cake with chocolate icing and rainbow sprinkles sliding down her throat. No Swiss clockmaker could’ve picked out the codes with more dexterity and accuracy. To distract herself further, Penny punched another combination of keys and tasted delicious butter brickle ice cream. Regardless, her busy fingers weren’t satisfied. Making quick work, she prompted the nanobots in her brain and bloodstream to create the overwhelming pleasure of Tom Berenger and Richard Thomas kissing her wetly on the lips and breasts.

In the next instant, something shocking occurred. A sound. Someone spoke, and the kissing stopped. It was a familiar voice. A female voice. Penny’s eyes scoured the filthy cavern but found no explanation. The disembodied words were vague as a dream. But it was unmistakable: The speaker was Baba Gray-Beard. Hanging in the chill air was the odor of fermented egg yolks, the signature aroma of the lamia’s labored sex panting.

Dared Penny hope? Might the great mystic’s ghost return to make love magic to her while she slept? A darker possibility was that the nanobots were somehow continuing to shape her perceptions. Faint as a thought, the Baba ordered, “Destroy it!” In words as weak as an echo of an echo of an echo, the spirit warned, “Little one, such power will corrupt you as it did Maxwell.…” The spirit urged, “Mash the evil controller device betwixt two large rocks before it
seduces you
!”

In awed response, Penny whispered, “Baba, are you here?”

She waited, listening, hearing only the fierce wind. She sat and contemplated a future of solitude with only the hoary love implements hewn from bone and sinew. She counted to a hundred in fives. She examined the sorry state of her cuticles. After that, she counted to a thousand by twenties. The sex witch’s ghost spoke no more. The youthful sex apprentice struggled with the decision of what to do next.

Immediately, inspiration struck. The DataMicroCom satellites were still in orbit. Why couldn’t she deliver succor to the legions of gals worldwide who were sharing this same withdrawal from Beautiful You bliss?

Unselfishly, she toggled and keyboarded until these same amazing sensations were bombarding all the women implanted by Beautiful You products. Penny’s mom in Omaha. Sassy, spunky Monique. Even Brenda—now Yuri’s newlywed bride
and
the CFO of Allied Chemical Corp. Kwan Qxi and Esperanza, too! Wherever they were, they would all be savoring rich desserts and the heavenly bliss of ripe movie-star smooches.

Impulsively, she filled their far-flung nostrils with mango-scented breezes. Let all her sister women rejoice, Penny told herself. Through her they would achieve solidarity.

While their actual circumstances might be grinding poverty
and ignorance, she’d bestow upon them a rich surrogate reality. She’d deliver to their taste buds an unending banquet of gourmet delicacies. An unending repast without a single fattening calorie! She’d replace their mundane thoughts with snippets of inspirational poetry read aloud by the cultured mouth of Meryl Streep.

A few pecks on the right keys, and she’d carpet-bomb them with self-esteem and resolve problematic body-image issues for all time.

She cupped her breasts in her palms and lifted them, examining the nipples with growing awe and wonder. They were astonishing. Her heart, nay, every cell of her swelled in recognition of her own glory and beauty. Following suit, women around the world—tall women, crippled women, fat, old, young and skinny women, they rediscovered themselves. Wherever they were at that moment in their lives—dining at picnics or riding aboard buses or performing intricate brain surgeries—they paused and regarded their bodies with a new, powerful appreciation. Flat-chested, bowlegged, humpbacked, or balding, Penny would force them to recognize their innate beauty. At her satellite-relayed prompting, all women would begin to pet themselves, reveling in the quality of their skin. Penny’s electronic urging would compel them to immediately celebrate their bodies with vigorous self-romancing.

This, this was power. She, Penelope Harrigan, would reign over the world, a benevolent lady dictator, awarding well-deserved pleasure to the multitudes. She’d surpassed the power wielded by even her heroes, Clarissa Hind and Alouette D’Ambrosia. To redeem Max’s wicked technology, she would singlehandedly bring about world peace and order. She’d reward good behavior and punish the bad.

The generations of females trained too long to look for
insults and injustice, Penny would pummel them with joy and drive them to accept happiness. A happy ending. With stealthy, subtle manipulation of their pleasure centers, she’d gently bully them into achieving their full erotic potential. Lady political activists might bicker over their strategic goals, platforms, and agendas, but Penny would trump their catfighting by giving them tsunami waves of physical thrills.

An ancient truism had once decreed, “Self-improvement is masturbation.…” At last the inverse would also be true.

“Baba,” she cried out, “rest easy, my guardian! I will not allow the power to overcome me!”

This
, Penny whispered to herself,
this would be the best time in history to be a woman
.

She’d give ladies the ultimate zipless fuck. Erica Jong would be so proud of her. This—sex crafting, practicing carnal magic—would be the new frontier for the next generation of young female searchers.

Acting on a generous impulse, Penny pressed the buttons that would bestow a loving, sisterly, long-distance hug on Gloria Steinem.